September 6, 2019

Financial Services Digital Marketing Spotlight Roundup: 5 September 2019

Our Financial Services Digital Marketing Spotlight on Thursday gave delegates the chance to listen to six speakers talk about a wide range of topics, from zero-party data to psychological techniques to over-50s and digital finances. In the roundup of the event you can read about the highlights of each presentation.

Open Finance: Staying Alive

With a population that is living increasingly longer, the number of over-50s is rising. Tim Jones, Managing Director at True Digital told us how this age group feels about the move towards digital finances. True works mostly with companies in the financial services sector and did some research into the relationship between financial services, technology, and growing old.

Tim pointed out that a lot of marketers focus on the youth market but, in reality, most of the wealth is with older people. In ten years, 50 per cent of the adult population will be over 50 due to the large increase in average lifespan over the last century. Tim said that it’s not only that people are living longer but they’re perceived as younger for longer.

True found that, although most over-50s were willing to move towards the digital, they were getting left behind in terms of knowledge and experience, although they learned faster if they had older children living with them. Tim talked about the preference many over-50s had for talking to a real person when managing their finances, and their perception of the self-service society. To hear more about longevity and digital finances, watch Tim’s presentation.

Bringing Open Banking To Life With Bud

Checking lots of different platforms and apps for our finances can be a hassle. It would be much easier to have everything in one place. Alan Walsh, Head of Network Partnerships at Bud, told us about the expected future of Open Banking and the changes it will bring about.

He pointed to the importance of APIs in connecting different data sources to provide customers with a more unified experience, saying that the more you know about a customer, the better the service you can provide for them. Alan illustrated this with Netflix and how they have a selection of tiles for each show, displaying the one they think each customer will be most drawn to based on their watch history.

Consumers’ growing dislike for hopping between different platforms all the time means that companies who have traditionally been competitors are becoming more likely to collaborate, for example Netflix and Sky. Alan encouraged businesses to have APIs and to potentially collaborate with other organisations to make better use of the products and services they offer.

He talked about rent recognition and how it can improve customers’ credit scores, possibly also integrating this with other regular payments, such as council tax, gym memberships, phone contracts, and pension schemes. To hear more about where Open Banking is headed, watch Alan’s presentation. 

Being More Bi-Modal In Your Marketing Education

Customers have certain expectations about how brands deliver experiences to them, which vary depending on the customer, for example how old they are. This, combined with new regulations, means that things are changing very quickly and so brands need to keep up to keep going. Gary Arnold, Strategic Consulting Director at Edit Agency Ltd., talked about the importance of a bi-modal approach within marketing.

Edit helps clients get customers and keep them. They use data to help clients understand their customers and how to connect with them. Gary explained that scalability and innovation are two things that need to be combined within a successful marketing strategy.

This bi-modality involves experimenting with certain customers into potential ways of engaging them, and then scaling up successful experiments to more customers for more efficient marketing. Gary showed us how to divide a time budget between experimentation and the normal operations of the company, and the merit of having separate teams working on each. Watch Gary’s presentation to find out more about how to combine innovation and scalability.

Maintaining Customer Engagement In The Midst of Regulation

Creating personalised experiences for customers has become difficult in the post-GDPR era, but customers are demanding their experiences become more and more personalised. How can brands provide these personalised experiences their customers want while remaining GDPR-compliant? Sharon Forder, VP Marketing EMEA at Cheetah Digital, told us. Cheetah Digital helps organisations build lasting relationships with their customers, from initially attracting the customer to making them into advocates for the brand.

Customers expect brands to have an understanding of them as individuals but this is hard to do with all the regulations controlling personal data. Sharon explained that, although traditional methods, such as third party data and cookies, have become less available since GDPR, zero party data allows brands to legally get information from customers because it requires customers to choose to share their information.

Sharon pointed out that, when consumers provide their information, they usually want something in return. This is done by giving them a more personalised, meaningful experience. Getting zero party data can start by asking your customer simple questions about their preferences, and then build up over time to gain more data. To learn more about creating personalised experiences for your customers in the post-GDPR era, watch Sharon’s presentation.

CMO Search Intelligence Index: Finance Benchmark

Checking how competitors are doing and how to outperform them is key to brand success, and search intelligence is an important part of this process. Lorna Gill, Marketing Manager at Adthena, spoke about the competitive search intelligence that they provide, and how this can improve brands’ understanding of consumer intent and what their competitors are doing better. She told us that, although 92 per cent of CMOs think paid search is important, only 41 per cent actually track how well they’re performing compared to their competitors.

Lorna talked about the use of search intelligence, not only for marketing, but also for identifying gaps in the market. She explained that Adthena uses AI to gather keywords from their clients’ websites, searches for them on Google, and then does the same thing for the websites that come up in the search. They show their clients how well they are performing in searches compared with their competitors, and help them understand what’s affecting the success of their campaigns.

Adthena creates score cards for companies based on their market leadership, search excellence, and brand ownership, which together create their search intelligence score. This score shows the clients what they need to improve on to overtake their competitors and what they are doing well. Watch Lorna’s presentation to find how search intelligence can improve your brand’s success in searches.

What’s In A Brain? The Psychology Behind Successful Advocacy Programmes

How can brands understand how customers think and tap into their desires and motivations? They need to turn to psychology. Robin Bresnark, Director of Client Success at Buyapowa, uses various psychology techniques to improve the efficiency of refer-a-friend programmes for his clients. He talked us through how he does this.

He explained how making customers feel indebted to a brand can encourage them to give more back, how limiting the number of referrals customers have can actually have a positive effect on referral rate, and how this same psychology can make customers’ friends more likely to choose the product. Robin also showed us how to use people’s natural competitiveness to get customers to compete with each other.

He discussed the different marketing strategies that are more effective for female versus male customers, using psychology studies into the reward centre of the brain. Refer-a-friend programmes (that reward both the customer and their friend) should be presented in different ways to female and male customers based on their respective values. Watch Robin’s presentation to learn more about the psychology tactics that can be put into play when engaging customers.